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Home , Jean Melzer, Martin Rotsey, Peter Garrett

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14 Good Weekend August 15, 2009 he easy – and dare i say it tempting – story to write Translating about starts something like this. “Peter Garrett songs on the was once the bold and radical voice of two generations of Australians and at a crucial juncture in his life decided to pop stage into forsake his principles for political power. Or for political action on the ­irrelevance. Take your pick.” political stage We all know this story. It’s been doing the rounds for five years now, ever since Garrett agreed to throw in his lot with Labor and para- was never Tchute safely into the seat of Kingsford Smith. It’s the story, in effect, going to be of Faust, God’s favoured mortal in Goethe’s epic poem, who made his com- easy, but to his pact with the Devil – in this case Labor Party – so that he might gain ultimate influence on earth. The price, of course – his service to critics, Peter the Devil in the afterlife. Garrett has We’ve read and heard variations on this Faustian theme in newspapers, failed more across dinner tables, in online chat rooms, up-country, outback – everyone, it seems, has had a view on ’s federal Minister for the Environment, spectacularly Arts and Heritage, not to mention another song lyric to throw at him for than they ever his alleged hollow pretence. imagined. He’s all “power no passion”, he’s living “on his knees”, he’s “lost his voice”, he’s a “shadow” of the man he once was, he’s “seven feet of pure liability”, David Leser he’s a “galah”, “a warbling twit”, “a dead fish”, and this is his “year of living talks to the hypocritically”. The denunciations have been savage and have flowed forth former rocker from one end of the country to the other. Until recently there was a giant poster plastered on Darwin’s Woolworths now in a very building declaring: “Peter Garrett, The Ultimate Sell-Out.” Garrett’s mouth hard place. was taped shut with an adhesive plaster marked “ALP”, and his forehead branded with an imprint of his own blood-soaked left hand. The poster has since been removed but the casual shopper can still see a portion of Garrett’s trademark chrome dome covering a few bricks in the wall. More than 3700 kilometres away, near the entrance to the Upper Florentine Valley in Tasmania’s south-west wilderness, protesters have been staging tree- sits and chaining themselves to rusted cars for years now in a vain attempt to stop the logging of some of the world’s most treasured native forests. When I visited the forest last year, I found the windows of one of these old cars covered in images of our Environment Minister, two scrawled cap- tions demanding to know: “Will The Real Peter Garrett Stand Up” and peter “How Can You Sleep When Our Old Growth Is Burning?” It’s a far cry from the man who for nearly 30 years performed to adoring and the crowds across Australia and around the world – Time magazine’s “walking

icon of outrage” who sucked in the oxygen, spat out the lyrics and left no one in any doubt where he stood on all the important issues of the day. wolvesBut as he told the Federal Parliament in his maiden speech on December 8, 2004: “I have protested, sung, marched, written, organised and cam- paigned on those things I simply believed were important, not just to me but to the life of the nation. I have reached the point where I want to take the next step into formal politics.” Peter Garrett was always the politician masquerading as the rock star. In 1984, he stepped away from the disguise by declaring himself a candidate for the at the head of the Nuclear Disarmament Party ticket. He failed to get elected because the Hawke Labor government decid- ed to pass its preferences to the Liberals, indicating just how alarmed it was by Garrett’s pull on the young and disaffected. Subsequently, he served two terms as president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and also joined the international board of , but it was obvious that his sights were set on higher goals. In an interview for HQ magazine 19 years ago with this writer, he said that although he was not plotting his way to the prime ministership, he wouldn’t say no to the prospect. “I don’t think at this stage of my life that Portrait Tim Bauer I can say that it’s something I would not do … that, no, I wouldn’t want to

August 15, 2009 Good Weekend 15 be PM. Yes, I would be quite happy if enough people voted for me, and there were a whole lot of people working with me, to have a go at that job.” After Garrett’s five years in Federal Parliament, there is now virtually no one who thinks this is achievable. To some political observers, he has become a parenthesis in the national equation, particularly after being stripped of climate change and water responsibilities following the 2007 election. “I think the press gallery is always pretty hard on people,” Tony Wright, ’s national affairs correspondent, says, “and once de- cided to split environment in two and give climate change and water, the gallery began discounting him as a star force. “You don’t normally feel great sorrow for politicians, but I do feel sorry for him. This is a person who had such a huge profile and so many expecta- tions laid on him and then the political machine consumed him. A lot of people think he’s Faust, but I don’t. I think he’s howling in the wilderness.” Peter Garrett as Faust or King Lear? Either one has its own cheerless ap- peal, but prefers the parable of Little Red Riding Hood when discussing his old environmental comrade. The two have known each other since the forest protests of the early 1980s, when Garrett stayed at Brown’s home in Liffey, in northern Tasmania, the night before addressing a rally at Cradle Mountain. Brown remembers the night well, because the car they were travelling in was hit by lightning. “I don’t know what the significance in the order of the universe was about that particular event,” he says now, “but I remember it clearly and I remem- ber the enormous value and persuasion having Peter at that rally gave us.” Two decades later, in April 2003, Brown paid a visit to Garrett at his home in Mittagong, in the Southern Highlands of NSW, to try to convince Garrett to join the Greens. A few months earlier, Garrett had announced his retire- ment from to pursue a political career. Says Brown: “I told him how the [wolf dressed up as] Grandma Big Party says to Little Red Riding Hood, ‘Come a little closer, dearie’, and then swallows up Little Red Riding Hood and you never hear from her again. I pointed out the tragedy that had befallen Cheryl Kernot … and talked about how the big parties of the left always put on their green spots in opposition and shed them in government. That’s exactly what we’re seeing in Australia in 2009.”

ask garrett about this on a brisk, sunny morning in june as we travel in his Commonwealth car from Sydney to the Blue Mountains on I what happens to be World Environment Day. I ask him whether he ever imagined seeing his own personal brand trashed to this extent. “I was certainly aware of the fact that generally in the hurly-burly of media and public debate about politics, politicians can become road kill,” he replies. “That’s a clear and recurring pattern and some suffer slight grazes and for others it can be more fatal. But the point of all of this – and it doesn’t matter how much cynics gag on people saying they go into public life “You don’t . “It was very prophetic,” she tells me, “because I was cov- because they want to serve – the fact is that’s what the greater majority do. normally feel ered in burns … and I didn’t know whether it was a dream or hallucination “And if your preoccupation is with securing your brand, then you’re not because of all the drugs, but he definitely came into my room.” cut out to be a politician. That wasn’t my preoccupation. It wasn’t when great sorrow Shortly after her release from hospital, Jenny attended the first local foot- I was a musician and it isn’t when I’m a politician.” for politicians, ball match after the fires to witness Garrett perform the national anthem To be fair, there are other ways to assess the brand. During the 2007 federal but I do feel with her son-in-law, Ross Buchanan, father of her lost grandchildren. election campaign, despite two disastrous slip-ups, Garrett found himself sorry for him. A short time later, she turned in her chair to find Garrett sitting next to her. constantly in demand from colleagues wanting to bask in his reflected glory. I think he’s “I thought I’d like to meet you in the flesh,” he told her. He turned up in at least 17 electorates, including most of the marginal seats, howling in the The two of them talked for 20 minutes, and Garrett revealed to the and whenever he did, the crowds were bigger, happier, more passionate. 67-year-old grandmother the story of his own shocking loss as a young Tim Gartrell, former Labor Party national secretary, recalls an occasion at wilderness.” man, when he was burnt trying to save his mother from their burning Sydney airport during the campaign when Garrett was waiting to board a house, from her burning bed. “He was just so lovely,” Jenny Clark says, “and flight with two fellow shadow ministers. “All these people were coming up I told him, ‘You should give up your day job and go back to singing.’ ” to Peter and saying, ‘Good on you … keep up the fight’, and Peter was say- ing, ‘I’d like to introduce you to my colleagues’ … these were politicians eter garrett is an easy man to like and a difficult man to more senior than him.” know. Contrary to what he says about his lack of preoccupation with They call it the PG factor, and never was it more evident than after the Pbrand, during his days with Midnight Oil he was famous for building devastating Victorian bushfires this year when – with his Prime Minister’s a fortress around himself. Journalists were carefully scrutinised before in- blessing – the then 55-year-old frontbencher (the second-oldest member of terviews and every aspect of the band’s image closely vetted by himself and cabinet after ) returned to the stage with Midnight Oil for two manager Gary Morris. It probably ensured Midnight Oil’s survival in what warm-up gigs at the Royal Theatre in Canberra, followed by a spellbinding was always a ruthless industry, but it also fostered enormous hostility and performance at the MCG in front of 81,000 people. robbed the band sometimes of its essential humanity. “It was unprecedented,” Midnight Oil drummer offers now. Garrett is still like this. Controlled and controlling. His cause is hardly “I can’t think of another situation where a federal cabinet minister would go helped by a Prime Minister who appears equally so, cautiously and prag- back to his former career – in Pete’s case, singing – and perform better than matically running a government some observers liken to a personal fiefdom. he ever did in his heyday. It was by any account a magnificent achievement.” With Garrett, though, the reticence seems inwoven, built into the nervous “Icon of outrage”: And then, three weeks later, with far less fanfare, he visited the scorched (above) Garrett in the front system. His long bean-pole frame shifts uncomfortably whenever the ques- earth of Kinglake, north of , where dozens of people had died in line of the Walk Against tions veer towards the personal, as though each question is a trap or a the inferno, five of them inside the home of Jenny and Mick Clark. Warming in Sydney, breach of national security. Jenny Clark spent 12 days at the Alfred Hospital burns unit in Melbourne November 2007; (top) In preparation for this article, I asked to speak to his German-born psycho­ after losing her son and desperately trying – unsuccessfully – to save her in 1990 with, from left, therapist wife, Doris, who, over more than 20 years, to the best of my knowl- Midnight Oil members Rob two grandchildren. It was during that time that she dreamt Peter Garrett Hirst, , Bones edge, has never consented to an interview. “Ah, look,” Garrett said when we had visited her in her room and sung to her the band’s most famous song, Hillman and . met in his ministerial office in Canberra, “I just think this is a piece that’s

16 Good Weekend August 15, 2009 logging of the Upper Florentine and the Wielangta Forest in Tasmania; that he’d given assent to the expansion of the Beverley uranium mine in South Australia, and only last month gave approval for the new Four Mile urani- um mine 550 kilometres north of Adelaide; that he’d also failed to follow up on a pledge to take to the International Court over its whaling operations; and that he’d abandoned a lifetime’s opposition to the joint American-Australian defence facility at .

ut having said that, it was equally true i’d given (until this point) little if any proper consideration to the complexities involved: Bthat the McArthur River Mine project alone was a farrago of compet- ing environmental, indigenous and economic interests; that along with the pulp mill, Garrett had inherited undertakings from a previous government; that with Gunns there were legal and financial obligations; that the Regional Forest Agreements governing forestry practices had been accepted by both major political parties; that with most of these decisions there had been strengthened environmental conditions imposed by Garrett; and that he was bound by the legislation, as well as by caucus and cabinet solidarity. There was also the unarguable fact that for 12 years the Howard govern- ment had done virtually nothing on the critical issues of energy efficiency and waste; that in the space of 18 months, Labor’s star recruit, stripped by his Prime Minister of half his portfolio (as well as undermined publicly by his boss on a range of issues, including whether or not to climb Uluru), had been instrumental in implementing a national waste strategy and the largest roll-out of household energy efficiency measures in the country’s history. Not to mention a $2.25 billion Caring For Our Country program that in- cluded a substantial increase in the National Reserve System of protected areas and a $200 million Great Barrier Reef rescue package; funding for an additional 300 indigenous rangers, a new Coral Sea Conservation Zone, a $480 million national solar schools plan, and the first independent review of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – Australia’s primary piece of environment and heritage legislation. Much of this was the so-called “low-hanging fruit” of greenhouse gas re- duction and to some, like Don Henry from the Australian Conservation Foundation, it represented “substantial progress on a number of fronts”. To old friends-turned-adversaries like Bob Brown, it was a case of Garrett hav- ing got lost in the orchards. “I like Peter a great deal,” Brown says, “and I feel a great deal of empathy with him … and when I think about the situation he is in, I feel a great deal of anxiety for him as a person. I would rather any day have Peter Garrett on the front bench of the ALP than most other contenders for that position … But he has failed in that portfolio. I have waited all my life for an Environment Minister who, like a treasurer or minister for mines, goes into cabinet abso- about me as a politician, as a public figure, and I value my family life hugely. “I would rather lutely advocating for the interests which that minister upholds. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have a family held together and supporting have Peter “We don’t see that coming from this Environment Minister any more me and I hold that in such high regard … I think it should be perfectly okay than his predecessors – that ability to go in and advocate the extraordinary for someone to have a private family life. I treasure my family life.” Garrett on the advantages of tackling greenhouse gases, of ending logging of native forests Fair enough. So do most people, but in Garrett’s case the level of protec- front bench of and woodlands in Australia, the huge advantages of replacing coal-fired tiveness is curious. And noteworthy. Joking comparisons were known to be the ALP than power stations with energy-renewable and energy-saving alternatives; with made during the early ’90s between the Garretts and the von Trapps, the most other keeping nuclear ships out of our ports.” Austrian family of Sound of Music fame where the children were dressed contenders for Garrett’s response is restrained but direct. “The thing about the decision alike and summonsed by their father with a bosun’s whistle. Similarly, the that position to join a political party and participate fully in the life of that party has Garretts were strict and sheltering with their children when young. They nothing to do with [Little Red Riding Hood] nursery rhyme allegories, and wanted to shield them from the feral world of rock. … But he has it’s all to do with the necessary disciplines of working in a team. Garrett himself has a restraint about him, a watchfulness, that is at odds failed in that “Bob Brown is leader of the Greens Party, which is competing with the with his past rock-singer, preacher-man persona. The shame, from the pub- portfolio.” Labor Party for votes. It’s political rhetoric on Senator Brown’s part … I’m lic’s perspective, is that he is at his best when he abandons some of this hesi- not going into what I go into cabinet to say and do, because that’s a matter tancy, when he speaks from the heart – be that on the hustings, on the stage, for cabinet, and those discussions properly remain within the cabinet room. in the Federal Parliament or for an interview like this one. “What I can say is that I diligently and actively advance the interests of the He told me at our Canberra meeting that he had agreed to this particular environment, wherever and however I can, consistent with party policy. I do interview because “18 months into the life of a government” it was a good that mindful of the significant range of environment issues we face. And I do opportunity for him to provide “a stocktake and some reflections”. There it in order to be the best environment minister I can. And no one in the party, were other reasons too, I suspected. The first was that I had told him previ- in the caucus room or in the public, would be in any doubt about that.” ously the story would be written, with or without his co-operation. The Senator , Garrett’s principal ally in cabinet, backs up this second was that I believed there was a more interesting, more nuanced, view. “I think he’s a very strong advocate for his portfolio,” he tells me two story to be written than the ones to date. days before his own elevation to Minister for Defence. “One normally doesn’t Like millions of other Australians, I’d clung to the romantic fiction of talk about what occurs within cabinet, but I certainly think it’s reasonable for Peter Garrett remaining faithful to his songs, despite not having written me to say that to you. I don’t think being Environment Minister is an easy most of the lyrics. (Drummer Rob Hirst and guitarist Jim Moginie were al- portfolio, in any government of any Labor or non-Labor persuasion … but “Yeah, that’s right. ways the band’s chief songwriters.) I did become a politician”: I think Peter Garrett is meeting those challenges extraordinarily effectively.” I’d also found it difficult to square his decades-long credibility on envi- (above) with Kevin Rudd Finance Minister goes further. “It is an extremely challeng- ronmental issues off stage with the fact that he’d approved the construction, in February this year; ing thing to move from a position where you can simply say whatever you if not operation, of the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley; that (top) as a candidate for like in public, and you are not accountable for delivering outcomes or being he’d said yes to the resumption of zinc mining operations at the McArthur the Nuclear Disarmament part of a team, to being in a position where you are. Some people are much Party in the 1984 federal River in the ; that he’d supported plans to dredge Port election, with former ALP more comfortable shouting from the outside than working from the inside.

TONY MOTT; AFP; AAP Phillip Bay; that he’d been unwilling – or unable – to stop the continued senator . The debate about Peter’s position is really a microcosm of a wider debate

August 15, 2009 Good Weekend 17 about activism versus politics. As an activist you don’t have much power, and as a politician you operate under heavy constraints. “The second response I have to these criticisms is that it’s not the 1980s any more. Whether it is Peter or not, it is absurd to take the lyrics from a song in 1984 and then compare the singer’s view of the world 25 years later with those lyrics, without taking into account that we don’t live in 1984 any more.”

uring the course of researching this article, the question of Peter Garrett’s core values emerged many times. Tim Gartrell Dconfirmed that the party had done due diligence on Garrett before preselecting him as a candidate. “We thought there might be all sorts of stories about wild parties and girls and I remember we were all really disappointed. We were pathetic political hacks wanting to live vicariously through someone’s past, but there didn’t seem to be any of the usual string of paternity suits.” Paul Gilding endorses this perception. Gilding has known Garrett for more than 25 years, since working with him during the 1980s on the suc- cessful Save Jervis Bay campaign. Later, when Gilding became executive ­director of Greenpeace International, he brought Garrett onto the board. Gilding sympathises with his friend’s predicament because, apart from any- “We thought “There is absolutely an argument to say that Peter might have made a thing else, he, too, has lived with the accusation of betrayal. He went from mistake, but I think it’s too early to tell. It is absolutely possible that being a being an environmentalist to advising some of the biggest corporations in there might minister of the Crown is the most effective way Pete can contribute to the the world on sustainability issues. be all sorts of issues he cares about, and that we care about.” “I used to be a Maoist in my late teens and then I went into the military,” stories about These are ultimately the questions I wanted most to put to Garrett. Where Gilding says. “Then I went straight from Greenpeace to senior personal ad- wild parties did he go in the teatime of his soul when faced with agonising policy choices? viser to some of the biggest CEOs in the world. I was accused of being a and girls and Were there principles he would refuse to forsake, a hill he would be prepared sell-out by some of my best friends. I remember we to die on, for a creed or some cherished belief? “The question – and I have struggled with this myself – is where do you “Whether I or anyone else is going to be confronted with something have the most impact, where do you drive most effectively. It is always chang- were all really where they feel that their conscience and principles are so affronted by what ing as the world changes. I used to humiliate CEOs, and one needed to be disappointed.” they find themselves potentially surrounded by, who can say?” he replies. sufficiently emotionally unaware to live with that ethical contradiction – of “That’s a hypothetical question.” making leaders of companies look bad in order to get your point across.” What about the Kimberley coastline? Would it make him sick at heart to As for the idea that Garrett has forfeited his good name, Gilding says it is see a region he loved, and had visited many times with Midnight Oil, trans- preposterous. “The man is not capable of selling out. He is deeply enmeshed formed from an iconic wilderness into a lucrative gas-processing plant? in his values and beliefs. Selling out means betraying what you believe in for “I don’t – nor can I – bring a personal predilection, either in favour of or personal or financial gain. Peter is such an ethical person, such a values- opposed to, to any of these developments in my decision-making role,” he driven person, he couldn’t do it. says. “That would be to compromise my decision-making role.” that he was one of the rare politicians in Canberra who refused, point blank, to leak to the press. This didn’t mean he was an effective politician, but it said something important about his ethical framework, his deep Christian faith. When asked about his spiritual convictions, Garrett replies: “I share the general ethic of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think it’s really important for us to be givers and not takers, and I try to be a giver, not a taker. I value loyalty, friendship, fidelity and I think that given the brief transit that all of us have here, there’s always going to be a claim on us to think about what we leave behind.” Garrett’s grit and faith were supremely tested when he lost his father as a teenager, then his mother a few years later in that house fire. Friends will never forget him walking among the ash and cinders howling with grief. “It’s not something I want to say a great deal about,” he tells me finally, “other than it’s a vivid and painful experience. I reflected on it again when I went up to Kinglake … after the fires, and people had experienced sudden and traumatic loss of loved ones. It’s about as painful an experience as any- one can have. And for me, talking to people just quietly and privately, with- out imagining that I could be in the same place they were, I was able to say, ‘Look, I know what it’s like to lose a family member. You will come through What about a personal view on uranium mining or the practice of clear fell- “I treasure my family it. You can. Yes, you will mourn the loss. You will honour the memory, but ing? “Look … I’m not here to provide my personal views on the matter,” he life”: (above) Garrett with you will also validate that relationship by going on to do whatever you think says. “This is the whole point of me becoming a representative, a member of his wife, Doris, and two you can by living a good life.’ And that’s very much what I believe.” of their three daughters, the caucus, a member of the cabinet and a minister. What I’ve accepted is that Emily and Grace, in 2006; if I’m going to reflect and enter into a passionate engagement and discussion (opposite) performing with when peter garrett was a young man he was very good in the ocean. about some of these matters, I won’t be doing it in public. I’ll be doing it as a Midnight Oil at Homebush He would bodysurf out the back with board riders and slide down the face member of a party and I’ll be doing it mindful of the policies of the party and in 1986, the year of his of the wave as if he owned it. Today the waves have turned into political the platform of the party, and the disciplines of being in a political party. marriage. whirlpools, and the man on the front bench of the ap- “And I think that’s the crux of this, you know, ‘Peter Garrett is not the per- pears sidelined, diminished, far less in command. son he was before. He’s become a politician.’ Well, yeah, that’s right. I did be- That seems a pity, because, in full flight, Garrett’s is easily the most charis- come a politician and I made that step into the discipline of party politics.” matic, articulate, firebrand voice in the land. If only there were a way of divid- ing the man in two – of leaving one version on the outside to keep raising hell, vaclav havel, the dissident playwright and first president of the while planting another on the inside to keep chipping away at the margins. Czech Republic, once noted that it was not just “cold-hearted, cynical, arro- Perhaps the times will suit him, or perhaps he will decide he has made a gant, haughty or brawling persons” who succeeded in politics. “In the end,” gigantic mistake. Perhaps there can be no grand vision from him until the he said, “politeness and good manners” weigh more. ALP learns how to use him properly, or until his Prime Minister lets him Lindsay Tanner told me he could not recall a single conversation where off the leash. Or until Peter Garrett decides that the price is too high, that

TONY MOTT; GETTY IMAGES Peter Garrett had denigrated a colleague. Others have said similar things: this is the hill worth dying on. Only he can decide that.